Beyond impressive.
I finally corrected a major omission in my visual history of San Francisco. At last I went inside City Hall and I must say the experience was simply overwhelming. While the present 1915 structure is smaller than the original which was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake and fire, its proportions are far more pleasing. The dome is one of the largest in the world and, as befits America’s most productive state, the building is taller than the Capitol in Washington DC. The floor space is some 500,000 square feet; Buckingham Palace, by comparison, is over 800,000 square feet. It looks like several marble quarries were called into service in its construction and the quality and condition of the building are breathtaking.
As befits a great democracy, access is amazingly easy. You have your bag checked and pass through an airport-style scanner and that’s it. You are free to wander wherever you want and no one hassles you if you take pictures. As luck would have it someone was having a marriage celebration during my visit, and the sound of Vivaldi lofting into the great cupola while I gazed on in awe made for a wonderful visit. I made my way up many back staircases and engaged several City employees in discussion, finding them to be invariably helpful and as thrilled to be there as was I.
All the interior snaps were made on the Panny G3 at ISO 1600 in RAW format. The G3 has two incredibly useful click-stop settings on its mode dial – C1 and C2. I have both set for aperture priority with C1 at ISO320 and C2 at 1600, making switching simplicity itself. No need to dive into fiddly LCD menus. Compared with the G1’s sensor I estimate the G3 is not one but two stops finer grained – ISO 1600 is close, as regards noise, to ISO 400 on the G1, which is pretty amazing. I switched on that auto dynamic range control in the G3’s menu (a feature not available in the G1) and it did a fine job of taming some of the extreme contrasts on what was a very sunny day, with sunlight pouring through the windows. No need to mess with multiple exposures and HDR techniques. The following snaps are mostly straight from the camera, converted from RAW to JPG in Lightroom 3.5 RC.
Beaux Arts magnificence.
Looking down into the main hall.
Gorgeous light on one of the second floor landings.
A third floor corridor. Acres of marble.
Looking down on the grand staircase from the first floor landing.
A view across the main hall.
All ages come to visit.
Lovely architectural details which even Piranesi would admire.
Rear of a second floor landing, light streaming in.
Marriage ceremony on the second floor balcony, opposite the main staircase.
Memorializing the visit.
One of the staircases.
All snapped on the G3 with the 14-45mm kit lens at ISO 1600 (except for the exterior which was at ISO 320), all interiors at full aperture and handheld.
If you find yourself in San Francisco, take some time to visit this special building.
Other domes of western civilization worth a visit? Start at the top – Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City – Bernini’s spherical original stretched just so by a wizard, transmuting the ordinary into the magical. Brunelleschi’s Cathedral in Florence – was anything more perfect ever built? One of the great meldings of art and engineering. Then the Pantheon, I suppose, if bigness is your thing. And St. Paul’s in London, remarkable for its light airiness from a nation more given to the lugubrious in its architecture. And, frankly, it would be unfair to exclude City Hall from that short list.
Original City Hall destroyed in 1906. Note the ungainly proportions.